Grand Finale of STReESS

In: Wood anatomy news, IAWA Newsletter, May 2016 (Pieter Baas)

The COST Action STReESS (Studying Tree Responses to extreme Events: a SynthesiS) celebrated its conclusion with a meeting in the forest of Joachimstahl (Germany, near Eberswalde) from 12–14 April. The programme featured a stimulating symposium on the major themes of the action, culmination in a key-note by Amy Zanne. During the opening session Hans Beeckman proudly presented a dummy of the bulky special IAWA Journal issue 37 (2) on Functional Traits in Wood Anatomy (which he coedited with Pieter Baas, Katarina Čufar and Veronica De Micco) to Ute Sass-Klaassen, Chair of this COST action. The twelve papers in that special issue are largely the result of intensive international cooperation within the STReESS topic group on functional traits and databases.

Other highlights of the meeting were an outreach event with demonstrations of sophisticated equipment and research projects and Kathy Steppe’s Twittering tree which communicated its physiological condition and activities via a twitter account. Since all the measuring equipment feeding the twitter-data was attached to an as yet leafless birch tree, the German National TV programme Tagesthemen rightly concluded that the tree’s twitter account had effectively been hacked by the large mistletoe, happily transpiring and photosynthesizing a few metres above the sapstream decoders.

Wood anatomy played a major role throughout the COST action with, in the outreach event, a long red carpet manufactured by the Padua group and imprinted with the nicest possible stitched micrograph of an especially long increment core of Larix decidua. IAWA is greatly indebted to the coordinators of the COST action Ute Sass-Klaassen and Paulo Cherubini, who both actively promoted cooperation with IAWA and other specialized international associations throughout the duration of the action.

Photo: STREeSS delegates (Arturo Pacheco, Angela Prendin and Giai Petit) sitting on the Larix decicua carpet designed and made by Marco Carrer and Arturo Pacheco from Padua.